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Some presidents use the State of the Union to sell policies. Most use it to sell a definition of America. The easiest way to spot the difference is to watch which words they keep returning to, and which words they avoid.
For President Donald Trump, the notable recurring word in his addresses is a now-familiar adjective: "great." He uses it to enlarge everything in reach—America, jobs, walls, comebacks.
The more revealing word, for his critics at least, may be one he has used only once so far. It's worth watching out for in his address tonight.
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Common Knowledge
Start with Trump’s favorite "great."
In 2017 (strictly speaking a speech to a joint session of Congress, not a State of the Union), he didn’t just promise a border wall. He promised "the construction of a great, great wall along our southern border."
By 2020, "great" had become the cement holding together wildly different parts of the speech. There's "our great Republican tax cuts." There’s the rehabilitated former prisoner who found a company and is now "drug-free…keep up the great work." There’s the rhetorical flourishes—"a great education," "a great job," "a great honor"—that turn individual stories into parts of his brand.
Uncommon Knowledge
The word "democracy," on the other hand, is mostly missing from the Trump-era SOTU record. In official transcripts, it doesn’t appear in 2017, 2018, or 2019.
When it finally arrives in 2020, it’s intriguingly attached to a specific claim about a "59-nation diplomatic coalition" against President Nicolás Maduro, immediately followed by Trump introducing Juan Guaidó as the "true and legitimate President of Venezuela." He said the U.S. was "supporting the hopes" of others "to restore democracy." Given events in his second term, nobody could accuse Trump of not flagging early where one his principal concerns lay.
Then there’s "inflation," another noun that more recently has tended to dominate American political conversations. In Trump’s 2017–2020 SOTU-era speeches, it’s absent entirely. That doesn’t mean Trump never talked about prices or prosperity—he did, often. Of course, inflation became a more central issue after Joe Biden's term in office, and Trump has used the word "inflation" frequently in other speeches.
Biden’s speeches, in fact, are like a mirror image. Given the massive spike in inflation during his term, largely due to the pandemic, he used the word repeatedly.
In 2022: "Inflation is robbing them of gains…That’s why my top priority is getting prices under control." In 2024, he claimed victory: "Inflation has dropped from 9 percent to 3 percent."
Another word that Biden used repeatedly was "democracy." In his 2021 address, he announced that his mission is "rebuilding the Nation, revitalizing our democracy, and winning the future for America." In 2022, he framed Congress as "the citadel of democracy." In 2023, he turned it into a slogan: "With democracy, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is."
And in 2024, he called January 6 "the gravest threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War," then added: "America stood strong, and democracy prevailed."
Overall, in Trump’s addresses, "American" is the runaway top term (212 times), followed by "America" (122), then "country" (90) and "people" (80).
"Great" sits unusually high at 66 times, putting it in the same tier as "work" (66) and ahead of unmistakably Trumpian policy words like "border" (35) or "immigration" (24).
Biden’s most common words are similar ("American," "America," "people," "job," "work"). But the standout differences are the words Trump sidelines.
"Democracy" was a top-30 word for Biden (42 times). He also uses "great," but differently. It appears 18 times and the surrounding usage is typically narrative or descriptive: "the great American story" (2023), "a great inflection point" (2021), "the great comeback story" in Belvidere, Illinois (2024), "a great friend and a great labor leader."
None of this tells you what Trump, or even Biden, really believes. It tells you what Trump's SOTU rhetoric does: it inflates the mood with great, keeps the story centered on America or Americans, and, at least in first-term addresses, treats "democracy" and "inflation" as optional.
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